Does it sometimes seem as if your marketing and sales teams are trying to imitate the Hatfields and McCoys? Are you often paying them for time spent bickering and fighting?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then it’s time to get these two crucial departments back on track and working together.
Marketing and sales are the two sides of one coin. Marketing brings the customers in, and Sales closes the deals. Both jobs are critical and you will get the best results when both teams work together. Marketing and sales alignment has always been a challenge and in today’s business climate the challenges are even greater. So just how do you bring these two teams together? You can start with the two Ts — training and talking.
Training
Your marketing and sales teams should be well versed in their respective disciplines, but how much do they know about the other? By making sure that each team knows and understands what the other does, you establish familiarity and set a foundation for collaboration.
Talking
The biggest disconnect in any business is usually communication. If you have trained your teams, now is the time to build on that by fostering opportunities for the two teams to communicate more regularly and more effectively.
Once you have your marketing and sales staff training and talking, you can push them to new heights by:
- Championing experimentation
- Encouraging joint efforts
- Providing incentives for successful collaborative efforts
Take out a coin out and look at it. There are definitely two sides. The next thing you see is that they are distinct, but they are not separate. They are joined in perfect alignment. That is exactly how your marketing and sales team should be.
Marketing and sales have different roles to play, but their objectives and goals are the same — to create sales for your company. The sooner you have them working together in harmony, the better chance they will have to succeed.
